August 31, 2007
InfoVista Discusses IP Communications, ITEXPO
By Rich Tehrani, President and Editor-in-Chief
InfoVista will be speaking on a panel titled Living with your U.C. Deployment at the upcoming ITEXPO in Los Angeles.
Alison O’Brien, Senior Product Marketing Manager at InfoVista, recently sat down with me to discuss the company’s participation at the event, their VistaInsight solution, and other IP communications solutions.
InfoVista is a service-centric performance management software company that works to assure the optimal delivery of business-critical IT services. Read more about them here.
RT: Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
AO’B: InfoVista is focused on a number of strategic growth initiatives in the service-centric performance management arena. Traditionally, we have focused on proactive performance monitoring and problem resolution, capacity planning and service level reporting of network based applications and services of large telecom service providers and enterprises. Our growth initiatives are moving us more strongly into next generation service performance assurance across the networks, systems and application domains. We are heavily focused on developing differentiated performance management tools for IP applications related to voice and video application delivery for carrier and broadband service providers and cable cos. In the enterprise domain we are pushing more directly into application monitoring both from end user experience measurements as well as application-centric infrastructure management perspectives. We recently launched our latest version of our VistaInsight for Servers (VIS) solution to meet the demands of managing heterogeneous physical and virtualized next-gen data centers for service providers and enterprises. We also continue to grow our significant capabilities for end-to-end and end user experience based service quality measurements (QoE and SQM) through both active and passive means across web applications, IP services like DNS, TCP and SIP, VoIP/Telephony, site to site network connectivity services leveraging Cisco ( News - Alert) IP SLA and Juniper RPM and extending into video delivery. These tools will help all our targeted market segments optimize their services operations processes for the next generation IP services.
RT: How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
AO’B: InfoVista has been focused on IP infrastructure management since inception and IP Communications and related applications is at the center of our growth strategy as outlined above in question #1. Our current product development initiatives are focused on delivering state of the art service-centric performance management tools for IP communications applications and services and their supporting cross-silo infrastructure. They cover both the residential as well as business service market segments being targeted by the service providers as well as shared services offerings within large enterprises.
RT: How has SIP changed communications?
AO’B: SIP has enabled the convergence of IP services over any medium/device. It is enabling FMC and providing a de-facto standard for developing innovative voice and other multimedia applications.
RT: What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?
AO’B: IP communications applications are becoming more real time more cross-silo, more heterogeneous (multiple vendor parts and alternatives), more dynamic, and of course more complex. The management paradigm is shifting from reacting to events “after they happen” to proactively managing issues of service quality degradation “before they impact” end users. Customers are demanding an integrated solution that can abstract meaningful management information across multiple business services, infrastructure silos and vendor technologies to provide a single view of service quality and performance for the delivered application — whether it be a business application portal, a voice call or a video conference session. This service view then seamlessly needs to connect to supporting infrastructure to correlate problem areas for rapid troubleshooting and service restoration, plan for rightsizing or capacity upgrades and provide personalized reporting that the service is being delivered as promised. Running a zoo of management products is no longer an option.
RT: How are you answering their demands?
AO’B: InfoVista’s VistaInsight solutions are built on a common foundation platform sharing the same object model schema, report provisioning rules, data and analytics. The platform is inherently cross-silo and continues to add newer capabilities to provide a complete end to end of representation of complex IP Communications services. For example, the recent evolutions of the foundation platform native covers data collection through SNMP, XML/SOAP, SSH, transactional data capture, specific virtualization API’s and a host of other methods to bring it all together in one view. InfoVista’s pure object model architecture enhances this greatly by providing the framework for abstraction, aggregation and presentation of these services.
RT: What do you think the future of the market is?
AO’B: The future is bright, but the players that can provide end to end solution with differentiated value-added services, will surpass the competition. Access and device agnostic services will continue to take center stage. In the consumer realm customers will demand the same level of service as they are used to with legacy modes and therefore providers need to enhance their level of management maturity to meet the management challenges. In the business realm the fact that IP Communications is creating new ways of working and collaborating and improving productivity means that it is here to stay.
RT: How does the U.S. growth rate compare to the rest of the world?
AO’B: From an IP Communications management perspective the U.S. is slower to adopt and take off compared to Europe or Asia and other emerging markets. Service Provider consolidation has slowed decision cycles. Cable providers are moving aggressively into the gap.
RT: What do you think of Google and Apple (News - Alert) entering the telecom market?
AO’B: Obviously this would create great disruption, but at the same time, more competition and hence innovation in the market. Initially, telecom apps from companies like Google and Apple will be the secondary services for the users, but eventually could lead to new business models in the industry. Telecoms and cable providers are going to fight really hard from a regulatory perspective to keep Google out of their markets as long as they can. It will inevitably lead to creative partnerships and alliances as none of the players have all the keys to the kingdom.
AO’B: Same as above. Microsoft will have to lean on smart partnerships with existing equipment providers to meet the high quality of experience requirements of the IP based multimedia telecom apps.
RT: How will wireless technologies change our market?
AO’B: Wireless 4G technologies (WiMAX ) will play a big role in the transport of IP based apps. It has the potential of lowering the costs for incumbent wireless carriers such as Sprint ( News - Alert) and enabling companies such as Google to become telecom service providers. We already see the effect of FMC in our revenues for areas like Mobile backhaul and rich media service delivery.
RT: What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?
AO’B: We will provide our perspective on the performance management challenges of managing next generation IP communications solutions and how providers and enterprises can meet those challenges. We will lay down a path to evolve performance maturity and meet the scale challenges when deployed apps move from pilot to production.
RT: Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?”
AO’B: InfoVista presents a unique perspective in the industry working with large Service Providers and Enterprises in some of the most complex and demanding environments. Our solutions apply to mid-market and large customers alike as they roll out new IP communication services across their organizations.
RT: What do you want the industry to know about your company?
AO’B: InfoVista is the industry leader in the service-centric performance management arena. We offer the most integrated, flexible, scalable, and innovative end-to-end performance management solutions for IP communications and services. We are pursuing a number of initiatives in industry forums to provide thought leadership and input to evolving management standards. Currently more than 80% of Tier 1 Providers worldwide as well as over 30 of the largest global corporations are our customers.
Service Level Agreement (SLA) | X | This is an introduction to the planning for QoS and Service Level Agreements. Simply, your performance is QoS and the guarantee is the SLA. That is, if you are not receiving the desired QoS from your ...more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X | A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
802.16 (WiMAX) | X | As a sister technology to Wi-Fi, the IEEE 802.16 specification outlines technology for Wireless Metro Area Network (MAN). WiMAX actually stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, whi...more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X | IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) | X | SIP is the real-time communication protocol for VoIP. SIP is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification (emergency calling) and instant messaging.
SIP...more |
(source: http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/hot-topics/ip-transition-enterprise/articles/10248-infovista-discusses-ip-communications-itexpo.htm)
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